1 online resource (xvi, 348 pages)

The 1960s left us with some striking images of American universities: Berkeley activists orating about free speech atop a surrounded police car; Harvard SDSers waylaying then-Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara; Columbia student radicals occupying campus buildings; and black militant Cornell students brandishing rifles, to name just a few. Tellingly, the most powerful and notorious image of campus protest is that of a teenage runaway, arms outstretched in anguish, kneeling beside the bloodied corpse of Jeff Miller at Kent State University. While much attention has been paid to the role of the elite schools in fomenting student radicalism, it was actually at state institutions, such as Kent State, Michigan State, SUNY, and Penn State, where anti-Vietnam War protest blossomed. Kenneth Heineman has pored over dozens of student newspapers, government documents, and personal archives, interviewed scores of activists, and attended activist reunions in an effort to recreate the origins of this historic movement. In Campus Wars, he presents his findings, examining the involvement of state universities in military research - and the attitudes of students, faculty, clergy, and administrators thereto - and the manner in which the campus peace campaign took hold and spread to become a national movement. Recreating watershed moments in dramatic narrative fashion, this engaging book is both a revisionist history and an important addition to the chronicle of the Vietnam War era

Includes bibliographical references (pages 315-325) and index

Print version record

pt. 1. "A New Generation of Americans ..." 1. "Bastions of Our Defense": Cold War University Administrators. 2. "Those People Would Do the Damndest Things": Faculty Peace Activists. 3. "The Genius of a Nation": Student Dissenters -- pt. 2. "Tempered by War ..." 4. "Let Us Try to Succeed with Reason": 1965-1967. 5. "You Don't Need a Weatherman": 1968-1969 -- pt. 3. "Disciplined by a Hard and Bitter Peace" 6. "Tin Soldiers and Nixon's Coming": 1970 -- Epilogue: "We Stand against Fear, Hate, Systems, and Structures Not in the Service of Man": Legacies of Protest

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